Posts Tagged ‘keyboard layout’

Taðýric finally has its own writing system. It took me a few tries to find something I liked, but finally I realized I need some sort of aesthetic commonalities between all these glyphs. The commonality I went with is a little radical, but none of the strokes are allowed to curve upwards. The result is something that looks to me like a lawn of twisted grass, or to others like rows of dancing ghosts.

The abugida is something of a cross between an abugida and a syllabary, as the glyphs for syllables with /e/ and /i/ as their nuclei are slightly irregular: Rather than consistent diacritics, certain strokes in the base glyph are doubled. I therefore needed to create both a font and a keyboard layout.

Here is the result!

This is my translation of Hávamál 93-95. I think it was worth the hours of effort.

I’ve been commissioned by Elmer Johnson to create a language for a novel he is intending to write. We are collaborating on it, and thusfar it has a diphthong-heavy phonology and a relatively regular abugida. Have a look.

So a week or two ago, I spent sixteen hours straight (that’s right: not even a bite to eat or a sit to poop) in a flurry of creativity to create the Sehali alphabet. It’s my first completely original alphabet in a rather long time, and it’s quite complex, working as a kind of composed syllabary, like hangul (Korean script). I’ve got it working nicely in tandem with the keyboard layout, which has changed a little to accommodate it. Don’t worry, though: it’s still full of all those dots and macrons and diaereses and circumflexes above and below everything to make it look like some sort of weird topsy-turvy agglutinating Vietnamese when written in Latin. I’m only just now writing a blog post about it, and the language still has a slim vocabulary, but I’ll celebrate by translating this blog’s title into my new lizardy script:

Since I now have my own webspace, I can finally reliably upload the fonts and keyboard layouts I create. I use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator for layouts, and HighLogic Font Creator for my fonts, and I’m proud of each and every one of them and have already included my Mésylþo keyboard layout and Asuran font.

I’m posting because I just decided to add a combination of font and keyboard layout for perhaps the most famous conceptualized language: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sindarin. Sindarin uses Tengwar as a writing system, which is an abugida — that is, each letter is made up of two parts: a consonant and a vowel, with the vowel in the form of a diacritic. It was therefore a lot of work to put every single syllabic glyph into the font as well as to set all the dead keys needed for the keyboard layout, but it does work, despite having been made back in 2009.

So, for those of you out there who really wish Elvish had Unicode representations, this is probably the next-best thing, and lets you type Sindarin using Tengwar (almost) just as you would type the romanization. Have fun!